2014 programme

Andrew Prentice

Monash University

The huge bounty of new data about the structure of our Solar system that has been acquired by NASA’s fleet of interplanetary spacecraft over the past 4 decades has greatly sharpened our understanding of the physical and chemical processes that were at work when the system was formed more than 4.5 billion years ago. Current missions include the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan (2004- ), the MESSENGER mission to Mercury (2011- ), the Dawn mission to the giant asteroids Vesta and Ceres (2011- ) and the New Horizons mission to Pluto and its moons (2015- ).

In this lecture I summarize what has so far been gleaned from the various spacecraft missions. I show how much of the detailed structure of the planetary system and that of the regular satellite systems of Jupiter and Saturn can be explained by the author’s modern Laplacian theory of solar system formation. The basic premise of this theory is that the planetary and satellite systems condensed from concentric families of orbiting gas rings. These rings were cast off from the equators of the respective rotating proto-solar and proto-planetary gas clouds by a new physical process of supersonic convective turbulence which I devised in 1973. I also discuss how Pluto and its largest moon Charon were formed, including the 4 recently-discovered smaller moons of Pluto, orbiting beyond Charon, whose existence I had predicted more than 20 years ago in 1993 (Aust. J. Astron. Vol.5, p.111-119). Lastly, I describe how I had successfully predicted both the mass and exact location of the 4th planet of the nearby star HR8799 more than 2 years before its discovery in 2010!

Dr Andrew Prentice is an expert on formation of our Solar System. He is a Melbourne-born mathematician who obtained his doctorate in theoretical astrophysics from Oxford University. Over the past 40 years he has developed a new theory for the formation of the Sun and its family of planets. This theory is known as the Modern Laplacian Theory (or MLT) and is based on a hypothesis that was first put forward more than 200 years ago by the French mathematician Pierre Laplace. Although his theory is still regarded as controversial, Dr Prentice has gained world-wide prominence over the past 25 years through the success of many key predictions based on the MLT. The impetus for making these predictions has been NASA’s on-going interplanetary spacecraft exploration program.

Dr Prentice has been an academic staff member of the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University since 1972. In 2011 he received the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. In that year he was also awarded a Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Citation. This citation recognized his ‘four decades of inspirational teaching of mathematics students, so that they may enjoy mathematics and think objectively with an open mind’. He is a Fellow of the Astronomical Society of Australia and a Fellow of Mannix College, Monash University. In June 2013 he was appointed as Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Queensland.